ng-demanded unity of
Germany, it did not dispossess the most insignificant of the princes
who ruled her; it did not draw closer the bonds of union between her
separated provinces; it never moved a single step to break down the
customhouse barriers that separated Hanover from Prussia, and Prussia
from Austria; it did not even make the slightest attempt to remove the
obnoxious dues that everywhere obstruct river navigation in Prussia.
But the less this Assembly did the more it blustered. It created a
German fleet--upon paper; it annexed Poland and Schleswig; it allowed
German-Austria to carry on war against Italy, and yet prohibited the
Italians from following up the Austrians into their safe retreat in
Germany; it gave three cheers and one cheer more for the French
republic, and it received Hungarian embassies, which certainly went
home with far more confused ideas about Germany than they had come
with.

This Assembly had been, in the beginning of the Revolution, the
bugbear of all German Governments. They had counted upon a very
dictatorial and revolutionary action on its part--on account of the
very want of definiteness in which it had been found necessary to
leave its competency. These Governments, therefore, got up a most
comprehensive system of intrigues in order to weaken the influence of
this dreaded body; but they proved to have more luck than wits, for
this Assembly did the work of the Governments better than they
themselves could have done. The chief feature among these intrigues
was the convocation of local Legislative Assemblies, and in
consequence, not only the lesser States convoked their legislatures,
but Prussia and Austria also called constituent assemblies. In these,
as in the Frankfort House of Representatives, the Liberal middle
class, or its allies, liberal lawyers, and bureaucrats had the
majority, and the turn affairs took in each of them was nearly the
same. The only difference is this, that the German National Assembly
was the parliament of an imaginary country, as it had declined the
task of forming what nevertheless was its own first condition of
existence, viz. a United Germany; that it discussed the imaginary and
never-to-be-carried-out measures of an imaginary government of its own
creation, and that it passed imaginary resolutions for which nobody
cared; while in Austria and Prussia the constituent bodies were at
least real parliaments, upsetting and creating real ministries, and
forcing,